Press Release of U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer

Boxer Calls on Department of Justice to Protect Americans from Voter Intimidation

Widespread
Efforts to Suppress the Vote, Particularly in Low-Income and Minority
Neighborhoods, Threaten the Right of Americans to Cast Ballots

Washington, D.C.
– U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today wrote a letter to Assistant
Attorney General Thomas Perez, the head of the Civil Rights Division of
the Department of Justice, calling on the agency to enforce voting
rights laws following new reports of widespread efforts by Tea
Party-linked groups to intimidate voters and suppress the vote,
particularly in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

“The right to vote has been the result of a long and difficult struggle in America,” Senator Boxer said. “It
has taken generations to ensure full voting rights for minorities,
women, and young people. No group can be allowed to intimidate or
interfere with this fundamental right that is essential for American
democracy.”

Boxer added, “The Voting Rights
Act of 1965 and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 prohibit
persons from knowingly and willfully intimidating or attempting to
intimidate, threaten or coerce another person for voting, attempting to
vote, or registering to vote.”

Senator Boxer highlighted a disturbing account in the Los Angeles Times
today of an Ohio woman recovering from cancer who received a letter
questioning her residence and right to vote in this election – even
though she had lived at that location for seven years. In the letter,
Boxer said, “This type of intimidation must stop. I don’t believe this is ‘True the Vote.’ I believe it’s ‘Stop the Vote.’ ”

You can read the full text of Senator Boxer’s letter to the Department of Justice below:

I have enclosed a very disturbing article from the Los Angeles Times, which details an organized effort in Ohio to question the voting rights of thousands of Americans.

As you know, an organization called “True the Vote,” which is an
offshoot of the Tea Party, is leading a voter suppression campaign in
many states.

The article highlights a woman recovering from
cancer who received a letter questioning her residence and right to vote
in this election. She was astounded by this outrageous charge as she
had lived in that location for seven years.

This type of intimidation must stop. I don’t believe this is “True the Vote.” I believe it’s “Stop the Vote.”

The right to vote has been the result of a long and difficult struggle
in America. It has taken generations to ensure full voting rights for
minorities, women, and young people. No group can be allowed to
intimidate or interfere with this fundamental right that is essential
for American democracy.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the
National Voter Registration Act of 1993 prohibit persons from knowingly
and willfully intimidating or attempting to intimidate, threaten or
coerce another person for voting, attempting to vote, or registering to
vote.

Please let me know if you are investigating voter suppression incidents such as the type described in the Los Angeles Times and the steps you are taking to enforcing voting rights laws across the country to ensure free and fair elections.

Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your immediate response.

And
what a surprise that the Catholic church is again trying to usurp our
democracy only one month out of an election. And these are the same
folks who tell us not to worry about uber-religious candidates, they
won’t let their church control them in office – until their church tries
to control them office. (There’s a bit of a “deny me three times”
element to the ongoing denial of uber- people of faith on this point –
your faith is your number one guidepost but you won’t legislate based on
it. Right.)

What a mean-spirited faith.
And the Catholics wonder why they have such a hard time getting new
priests and followers. Perhaps because no one wants to wake up early on
a Sunday to get yelled at.

A new poll
from the Pew Research Center shows that Catholics are strongly
supporting President Barack Obama in the coming election. Obama leads
his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, by a significant margin, 54-39
percent -- a 15 percent lead for the president. This is up from a slim
two percent margin in favor of President Obama in a similar poll in
June.

A lot has happened since June. On the Catholic front, in
between those two polls, the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops (USCCB) organized a major campaign, the Fortnight for Freedom,
from June 21 to July 4, trying to draw attention to alleged violations
of religious freedom in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
During the Fortnight, the USCCB characterized the requirement that
employee insurance plans must cover preventive medications, including
birth control, as an affront to American Catholics.

But the
bishops' protest has not done much to unite Catholics behind this latest
crusade against women's health and rights in this country. Among
Catholics who heard about the bishops' protest and disagree with them,
78 percent support President Obama. Putting that together with this
week's polling leads one to speculate that not only isn't the bishops'
campaign working -- it's backfiring.

The 2012 election is the
first time that both presidential tickets feature a Catholic candidate.
This led many to speculate that the mythical, courted, supposedly
monolithic Catholic vote was going to be an even bigger factor than
before. However, the reality is that the Catholic vote has mirrored the
popular vote in almost all of the presidential elections since President
Nixon was in office. Despite this evidence, there is a presumption that
Catholic voters are particularly conservative on social issues, and
that their religion and the views of their religious leaders play an
important role in Catholics' political decisions. This couldn't be
further from the truth.

The
most surprising thing is that it took this long. Frustrated Obama
obsessives, unable to believe that the rest of the country doesn't share
their paranoid suspicion that the president has dark secrets lurking
under his amiable exterior, have finally stooped to slurring his mother
through the time-honored method of calling her a slut.

Michelle Goldberg reports
for the Daily Beast on this new round of rumor-mongering about Obama's
origins, which comes mainly from two sources: Dinesh D'Souza's
best-selling book Obama's America and a pseudo-documentary Dreams From My Real Father that is currently being mailed out to voters in swing states.

Dreams From My Real Father peddles
a conspiracy theory so convoluted that more traditional birthers must
be envious of its creativity. The director, Joel Gilbert, argues that
Obama's real father is Frank Marshall Davis, a labor activist and poet,
and that Davis took bondage photos of Obama's mother, Stanley Ann
Dunham, that he then sold to nudie magazines. Naturally, these
questionable photos are prominently displayed in the documentary, and a
short clip from the movie with the photos is available for embedding on
every two-bit birther blog on the Internet. Gilbert claims to have
mailed out a million copies to voters in Ohio, and in this post-Citizens United era, it's quite possible he does have anonymous donors who made that kind of mail push possible.

D'Souza
is slightly less conspiracy-minded, but still subjects Dunham to the
same icky, dirty old man treatment conservative pundits seem to have
perfected. He accuses Dunham of neglecting her son so she could sleep
around Indonesia, painting her as a sexual predator and pretending to be
amazed that she supposedly got it on so often despite being a heavy
woman. Ginning up sexual hysteria appears to be its own reward for
D'Souza; any connection between his accusations and Obama's political
leanings is tenuous at best. The book really serves no other purpose
than to promote the notion that Obama is the dreaded Other and imply
that the nerdy family man exterior is simply a front for a subversive
America-hating radical.

Remember Archie Bunker, the bigot everyone could relate to? He created and conformed to our expectations.

And
while none of us believe we are one-dimensional, understanding we
contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman once said, we often accept
one-dimensional caricatures of other people, stereotypes reinforced in
the American media.

It is unfortunate but true that it is often
easier to deal with the predictability of a black-and-white world than
to grapple with contradictions and ambiguities. They make our lives
complex and sometimes unpredictable. We like security, and some of us
don't like surprises.

But if we keep our eyes and minds open,
surprises are inevitable, even desirable. In my many years working in
the social change sector with people of all backgrounds, I am often
surprised as my assumptions about an individual or group of people are
proven wrong. The reality is almost always far more complicated and
interesting than my stereotypes.

Given my experience, I’m
suspicious of the clichés about the white working-class -- their biases
and conservatism; how they don’t vote in their own interests – clichés
reinforced in much of the literature popular on the left.

One of the strongest biases is that college-educated whites are very different than working-class whites. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Council ,
funded in part by the Nathan Cummings Foundation, shows that on many
issues, it is not true. Take one striking example: there is virtually no
difference between whites who are working-class and college-educated in
identifying with the Tea Party, 10 and 13 percent, respectively. Equal
numbers from these two groups identify Fox as a trusted source of news
(27% and 28%).

And as Joan Walsh, author of What's Wrong with White People , wrote on Salon ,
the survey’s results "confounds those who believe that white
working-class people vote against their own interests. For example,
those who ‘receive food stamps in the last two years’ preferred Obama to
Romney 48%-36%.”

Police responded with tear gas when some demonstrators hurled Molotov cocktails at the finance ministry and parliament.

The
strike was called by the country's two biggest unions, which between
them represent half the workforce. It was the latest of at least 10
general strikes since 2010.

A survey conducted by the MRB polling
agency last week found that more than 90 percent of Greeks believe the
planned cuts are unfair and a burden on the poor.

Official
unemployment in the country runs at 25 percent; fully half of young
people have no work. Those Greeks still working would labor six days a
week under the new plan.

Already this year the minimum wage was
cut by 22 percent, and for those under 25, by 32 percent. In January,
the public electricity company raised rates 15-20 percent. The
government has ordered an expiration date no later than February 2013
for all collective bargaining agreements.

Posted by Natalie BennettFriday 28 September 2012In my first month as the new Green party leader,
I've spent lots of time talking about pressing economic and social
issues - the need for the minimum wage to be a living wage, how benefits
should be available to all who need them, and how costly and
destructive the privatisation of the NHS will be.

I
talk about the fact that the first two are technologies that are ready
to scale up right now, providing jobs and affordable supplies for
Britain. And about the fact that we know exactly what all of their
"fuel" supplies will cost indefinitely into the future - ie nothing.

I
talk about the way they can provide a decentralised, resilient energy
system that is able to withstand climate or other shocks. And I discuss
how nuclear is a distraction from the need to promote and invest in
renewables.

Fuelled by a fierce and well-funded industry lobby
claiming that nuclear would address the dire, if exaggerated, warnings
about "the lights going out", as well as the urgent need to reduce our
greenhouse gas emissions, the nuclear idea has gained some traction
recently in the UK.

So I think it is worth spending a little time talking about why nuclear power
is the Betamax of the energy world - a technology that was briefly in
the hunt, but now could be ready to fade away into a museum curiosity.
And you don't have to just believe me on this - consider this recent front page from the Economist.

It
is with trepidation that independent petroleum geologist Jeffrey Brown
has watched global oil exports decline since 2006. With all the
controversy in the past several years over whether worldwide oil
production can rise to quench the world's growing thirst for petroleum,
almost no one thought to ask what was happening to the level of oil
exports. And yet, each year a dwindling global pool of exports has been
generating ever greater competition among importing nations and has
become a largely unheralded force behind record high oil prices.

Even
though the trend in oil exports has been evident in the data for some
time, the analyst community was caught by surprise when a Citigroup report
released earlier this month forecast an end to oil exports in 2030 from
Saudi Arabia, currently the world's largest oil exporter.

Brown,
as you might expect, wasn't surprised at all. His own forecasting
model, which he calls the Export Land Model, has been predicting more or
less the same thing for some time. He doesn't think the Saudis will
actually let exports to go all the way to zero because they'll probably
want at least some revenue from exports. But "one to two million barrels
per day of exports [from Saudi Arabia] between 2030 and 2040 will not
be a big deal in the world," said Brown, who runs a joint venture
exploration program based in Ft. Worth.

Brown estimates that
worldwide net exports of petroleum liquids--a number that includes both
crude oil and refined products such as gasoline and diesel--declined
from 45.6 million barrels per day (mbpd) in 2006 to 43.7 mbpd in 2011.
He uses the net exports number because importers such as the United
States export some of their imported crude back into world markets in
the form of refined products such as gasoline and diesel. Even so, the
United States remains the world's largest net importer of petroleum
products.

The decline in global net exports may seem small for
now. But it is persistent and comes in the face of growing demand among
the rapidly expanding economies of Asia, particularly China and India.
And the trend lines, if they were to continue, would mean that China and
India alone would consume all the world's available petroleum exports
by around 2030. Something's bound to give before then, but it's not
clear exactly what.

From Inter Press Service: http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/09/climate-change-takes-a-bite-out-of-global-food-supply/By Stephen LeahySept. 29, 2012MONTEREY,
California, Sep 29 2012 (IPS) - Humanity’s ability to feed itself is in
serious doubt as climate change takes hold on land in the form of
droughts and extreme weather, as well as on the world’s oceans.Less
well known to many is the fact that emissions from burning oil, coal
and gas are both heating up the oceans and making them more acidic. That
is combining to reduce the amount of seafood that can be caught,
according to a new report released here.

Seafood is a primary
source of protein for more than a billion of the poorest people in the
world, said Matthew Huelsenbeck, report author and marine scientist at
Oceana, an environmental NGO.

“For many island nations like the
Maldives, seafood is the cheapest and most readily available source of
protein,” Huelsenbeck told IPS.

The Maldives, Togo and Comoros top
the list of nations whose food security is threatened by climate
change, according to the report, “Ocean-Based Food Security Threatened
in a High CO2 World”, which ranks the vulnerabilities of nations.
Surprisingly, Iran is fourth on that list. This is the first-ever look
at how climate change may affect food security for countries that are
dependent on fish and seafood.

The report was released this week at the Third International Symposium
on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World: Ocean Acidification, where nearly 600
scientists from around the world presented their research.Rising
ocean temperatures are pushing many fish away from the tropics towards
the poles where waters are cooler, researchers have documented. And in a
well-understood process, human emissions of CO2 have increased the
acidity of oceans by 30 percent, threatening fish habitats such as coral
reefs and thinning the shells of shellfish like oysters, clams and
mussels.

Don't know how I missed this before, but a study appearing in the July 2012 issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science
finds that atheists are more motivated by compassion than givers with
strong religious beliefs. This was not a study of whether atheists give
more or less than churchgoers -- that's a whole other controversy -- but
rather a study of why religious and nonreligious givers give. A May 1 MSNBC story reported the key point in these words:

Overall,
we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional
connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that
person or not," study co-author and University of California, Berkeley
social psychologist Robb Willer said in a statement. "The more
religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in
emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal
identity, or reputational concerns.

Remember,
Christianity strongly encourages charity-sometimes past the point of
good sense. Prosperity preachers urge the poor to send in their rent
money and hope God will provide. Granted, many Christians look down
their noses at prosperity preachers. But I have yet to meet a Christian
who doesn't think highly of Jesus, and he praised the widow for giving
the temple her last money in the world (Mark 12:42–44; Luke 21:1–4).
Beyond doubt, Christianity demands and praises charity. Close-knit
congregations can be hotbeds of social pressure to contribute, the
pressure coming from clergy and fellow congregants alike.

In
light of that, suppose for the sake of argument that churchgoers do
give more generously than seculars. Far from demonstrating that they are
more virtuous or caring, it may instead show that, driven by
expectation and community pressure, they give too much. Some may be
giving more than is compatible with their families' financial
well-being. And if churchgoers are giving too much, it might be us
seculars, free from slick-talking ministers and prodding, prying
pewmates, who are making more rational giving decisions and contributing
at sustainable levels.

Are you or someone you love in a committed same-sex relationship, hoping to get married?

The
national debate over marriage equality is about to enter a new phase,
as multiple cases make their way to the United States Supreme Court.
SCOTUS begins a new session next Monday, and today, in private
conference, the Court will decide which new cases to review. The
Proposition 8 case and several cases involving the Defense of Marriage
Act (DOMA)
are among those the Court may decide to take up, and their choices
today—which could be announced as early as tomorrow but certainly by the
start of the session on October 1—will have wide-reaching effects.

Take the Proposition 8 appeal. So far, California’s ban on same-sex marriage has not fared well in court and has been ruled unconstitutional, first by Judge Vaughn Walker, and then by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld his ruling.
Proponents of marriage equality successfully argued that rights
shouldn’t be put up to a vote, and that the marriage ban treats lesbians
and gays as second-class citizens. Supporters of Prop 8 want the
Supreme Court to re-affirm it, and in doing so keep marriage bans around
the country intact. If the Court does decide to take the case, the
decision could be quite narrow—only concerning California and, perhaps,
only concerning situations in which marriage rights were granted prior
to a public vote, or it could be a sweeping decision in one direction or
the other.

What if the Court decides NOT to hear the Prop 8 case?
That would be a disappointment to those on both sides who want to see
the case set precedent, but the immediate effect would be hugely
positive for same-sex couples eager to marry. Proposition 8 would be
removed from the books, and marriage equality would then be legal in the
most populous state in the union. Here come the bride-brides and the
groom-grooms!

An Illinois appeals court upheld a ruling Fridaythat
exempted pharmacists with religious objections from prescribing
emergency contraceptives, finding that the medical professionals were
protected by state law. The plaintiffs, both individual pharmacists and
corporations that own pharmacies, had challenged an order by then-Gov.
Rod Blagojevich requiring that pharmacists sell “Plan B,” a brand of the
contraceptive also known as the “morning-after pill.”

The court
rejected the ACLU’s argument that prescribing emergency
contraceptives fell under an exception in the Illinois Health Care Right
of Conscience for “emergency medical care,” even though doctors
testified that the contraceptive was most effective when taken
immediately after unprotected intercourse.

The three-justice
panel did narrow the scope of the lower court’s ruling, which had
entirely blocked the governor’s requirement to provide
contraceptives. The appeals court held instead that the state law merely
prohibits enforcement of the order against plaintiffs who claim a
religious exemption.

The court’s decision to allow individual
pharmacists to claim the protection of the law is not particularly
surprising, given the Illinois statute’s broad wording: “No physician or
health care personnel shall be civilly or criminally liable to any
person, estate, public or private entity or public official by reason of
his or her refusal to perform, assist, counsel, suggest, recommend,
refer or participate in any way in any particular form of health care
service which is contrary to the conscience of such physician or health
care personnel.”

Todd Akin appeared to endorse allowing employers to pay women less than men at a town hall on Thursday.Gender
discrimination in compensation has been illegal in the United States
since the passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act. But in video provided by
Sen. Claire McCaskill's campaign, Akin responded to a question about the
Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act -- which made it easier for workers to sue
over unequal pay -- by suggesting that employers shouldn't even be
barred from paying women less in the first place.

A new Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll
has the voting women of Ohio giving Barack Obama 25 points over Mitt
Romney. In Pennsylvania, women prefer Obama by 21 points and in Florida
the president has a 19-point advantage, according to the same poll. That
might have something to do with the war on women Republicans have been
accidentally waging this summer. Well, the war is not accidental—it’s
quite intentional—it just wasn’t meant to be this public.

Let’s talk about women.

My
grandmother didn’t think her daughter needed to go to college. Mom
could find a husband to provide for her. She went anyway and worked her
way through school until she got herself a “copyboy” job at the Los
Angeles Times at a time when women, if they were hired to write at all,
wrote about clothes and food.My mom became a reporter, an editor,
a bureau chief, an edition chief, an associate editor in charge of 10
sections and a vice president of a company that, when she got there,
thought she might be an aspiring secretary.

Let’s get back to my
grandmother, the one who didn’t care if her daughter went to college.
Obviously she turned out to be wrong. But Grams was, herself, an
extraordinary woman, the first person in her family to graduate from
high school.

Everyone agrees my grandfather was one of the most
decent people ever, but the least decent thing he did was to leave my
grandmother to raise the youngest of three children by herself. So she
was a single mom. She was also a United States Marine who fought Hitler,
Hirohito and pretty much anyone who didn’t chew his food properly. A
Polish-Ukrainian, she was initially treated like livestock in the home
of her Italian in-laws, but it was preferable to the home she had left
behind.Continue reading at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/republicans_lost_the_war_with_women_the_moment_they_declared_it_20120927/

The press everywhere is buzzing this week with premature obituaries of the Romney campaign. New polls
are out suggesting that Mitt Romney's electoral path to the presidency
is all but blocked. Unless someone snags an iPhone video of Obama taking
a leak on Ohio State mascot Brutus Buckeye, or stealing pain meds from a
Tampa retiree and sharing them with a bunch of Japanese carmakers, the
game looks pretty much up – Obama's widening leads in three battleground
states, Virginia, Ohio and Florida, seem to have sealed the deal.

That's
left the media to speculate, with a palpable air of sadness, over where
the system went wrong. Whatever you believe, many of these articles
say, wherever you rest on the ideological spectrum, you should be
disappointed that Obama ultimately had to run against such an
incompetent challenger. Weirdly, there seems to be an expectation that
presidential races should be closer, and that if one doesn't come down
to the wire in an exciting photo finish, we've all missed out somehow.

Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote a thoughtful, insightful editorial
today that blames the painful, repetitive and vacuous campaign process
for thinning the electoral herd and leaving us with only automatons and
demented narcissists willing to climb the mountain:

Romney's
bleeding has plenty to do with his intrinsic shortcomings and his
shortsightedness: how does a man who has harbored presidential ambitions
almost since he was a zygote create a paper trail of offshore accounts
and tax returns like his?

But I wonder if we're not seeing the
worst possible version of him, and if it isn't the ugly flower of the
process itself. I wonder, too, what the politicians mulling 2016 make of
it, and whether, God help us, we'll be looking at an even worse crop of
candidates then.

In
a somewhat desperate attempt to maintain morale among a Republican base
that disdains its standard-bearer, a number of conservative media
outlets are pushing an alternate reality in which Mitt Romney is leading
in the polls by wide margins and American voters have a decidedly
negative view not of the challenger, but of Barack Obama.

It's an
exceptionally dangerous game that the right-wing media are playing. If
Obama wins – and according to polling guru Nate Silver, he'd have a 95
percent chance of doing so if the vote were held today – there's a very
real danger that this spin -- combined with other campaign narratives
that are popular among the far-right -- could create a post-election
environment so toxic that it yields an outburst of politically motivated
violence.

A strategy that began with a series of rather silly
columns comparing 2012 with 1980, and assuring jittery conservatives
that a huge mass of independents was sure to break for Romney late and
deliver Obama the crushing defeat he so richly deserves, entered new
territory with the bizarre belief that all the polls are wrong. And not
only wrong, but intentionally rigged by “biased pollsters” – including those at Fox News – in the tank for Obama. (See Alex Pareene's piece for more on the right's new theory that the polls are being systematically “skewed.”)

Consider how a loosely-hinged member of the right-wing fringe – an unstable individual among the third of conservative Republicans who believe Obama's a Muslim or the almost two-thirds who think he was born in another country
– expecting a landslide victory for the Republican might process an
Obama victory. This is a group that has also been told, again and again,
that Democrats engage in widespread voter fraud – that there are
legions of undocumented immigrants, dead people and ineligible felons
voting in this election ( with the help of zombie ACORN ).
They've been told that Democrats are buying the election with promises
of “free stuff” offered to the slothful and unproductive half of the
population that pays no federal income taxes and refuses to “take
responsibility for their lives” – Romney's 47 percent.

They've also been told – by everyone from NRA president Wayne LaPierre to Mitt Romney
himself – that Obama plans to ban gun ownership in his second term.
(Two elaborate conspiracy theories have blossomed around this point. One
holds that Fast and Furious – which, in reality, is much ado about very little
– was designed to elevate gun violence to a point where seizing
Americans' firearms would become politically popular. The second holds
that a United Nations treaty on small arms transfers (from which the
United States has withdrawn) is in fact a stealthy workaround for the
Second Amendment.)

Every
study of taxes and taxation has been virtually unanimous that GOP
presidential contender Mitt Romney got it dead wrong that millions of
poor and working people pay no taxes and in essence leech off the
system. The taxes that the 47 percent that Romney blew off as tax losers
pay are for Medicare, Social Security, payroll taxes, and excise taxes.
They pay a far higher percentage of the state taxes than the top 1
percent of income earners in nearly very state, as well as sales taxes,
Even the number that supposedly pay not a dime in federal tax is badly
overstated. T he Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center whittled
the number down to 14 percent of households that paid neither federal
income tax nor payroll tax in 2009. Even this is misleading. The Center
for Budget and Policy Priorities found that between 1989 and 2006 more
than half of the tax filers who received the Earned Income Tax Credit
received it for no more than a year or two at a time and generally paid
substantial amounts of federal income tax in other years.

It's not
solely a matter of splitting hairs over dollars and cents and
percentages that pay and don't pay to. The poor and lower income workers
pay more than Romney for several well calculated reasons. There are too
few rich people, who pay too little taxes, and while the government
bills still have to be paid and they continue to rise. This is more
than simply a case of armies of corporate shilling tax lobbyists that
rig the tax system to insure that the rich duck and dodge their fair
share. The poor have always been viewed as a ready, easy, and accessible
piggy bank for state and federal governments to pay their always
increasing bills.

The prevailing thinking is that workers consume
while the rich and corporations (their employers) produce. In other
words they produce the capital that fuels the engine of commerce and
that in turn fuels the engine of government, so therefore the tax burden
for every type of consumption fee from food to gasoline, must be borne
by the poor and workers. Romney may have been "inelegant" as he put it
in stating this, but he has hit on that theme repeatedly on the campaign
trail. That government is a major impediment to private industry
revival and expansion. His answer is even less taxes on the rich and
corporations and though unstated since it would be the political kiss of
death in an election year to openly say it, that the poor and workers
must bear even more of the tax burden to make up for the shortfall.

This
is what happened when Reagan slashed taxes (prematurely it turned out
and had to increase them later). Bush Sr. despite his disastrous
campaign promise that there would be no tax hike on his watch then
promptly turned around and reneged on that promise once in the White
House did the same. They shifted upward the tax burden even more to the
workers. The two Bush tax cuts had the same effect. The rich paid even
less and the tax burden shifted upward again to the poor and workers
In 2008 nearly 1 in every 200 high-income taxpayers paid no federal
income tax, up from about 1 in 1,500 in 1998.Continue reading at: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-the-Poor-Pay-Far-More-by-earl-ofari-hutchin-120925-424.html

Of
course, “speaking truth to power” is a phrase normally used to describe
courageous souls who risk their own hides to take a principled stand
challenging those in power — not exactly what Mitt was doing.Rather,
assuming he was speaking privately to like-minded multi-millionaires,
the Republican presidential candidate told the $50,000-a-platers what
they wanted to hear: that he hasn’t any intention of helping the 47 per
cent of Americans too poor to pay income tax. “My job is not to worry
about those people.”

With this truthfulness caught on tape, Romney
has probably done more than incinerate his own presidential bid. He has
so vividly exposed the cynicism and greed that lies at the heart of
what is now called “conservatism” that he may have inadvertently begun
its undoing.

Once upon a time, “conservative” could be used to
describe people — Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, Robert
Stanfield, Joe Clark — who had a vision of society in which a privileged
elite dominated but also had a responsibility to less fortunate
citizens and to the broader “public good.”

But about 30 years ago,
a new breed of “conservative” slithered onto the political scene.
Stealing the moniker of conservatism, this new breed embraced the
inequality of traditional conservatism (driving it skyward) while
unburdening itself of the responsibility for others and the public good.

This new breed has proved itself to be self-centred, greedy and indifferent to the public good.

Not
a day goes by without you blaming me for every slumping or stagnant
economic indicator. Unemployment, increases in the number of food stamp
recipients, government borrowing, and spending, home foreclosures,
economic uncertainty for businesses, trade deficits – you name it. Only
for droughts and hurricanes have you absolved me from responsibility.

I
won’t go into what was inherited from your Republican party’s years in
office. Deregulation, non-enforcement, non-disclosure by the financial
industry, and subsidies and bailouts were that period’s hallmarks. But
if I were to be held responsible for the state of the American economy,
there would have to be a “command and control” economy enforced by the
White House. You know full well that is not the case for several
reasons.

First, our economy is dominated by corporations that make
their own investment and hiring decisions. Two-thirds of the tens of
millions of low-wage workers are employed by fifty large corporations,
such as Walmart and McDonald’s. Thirty million American workers are
laboring between the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and what the
minimum wage, adjusted for inflation from 1968, should be now – about
$10 per hour. These companies are successfully opposing in Congress any
increase in the minimum wage to such catch up with 1968. By the way, you
favored an inflation-adjusted minimum wage for years. During the
Republican primaries earlier this year, you changed your long-standing
position and now oppose raising the minimum wage.

Moreover, many
companies are sitting on more than $2 trillion in inactive cash
reserves. I have no power to get more of that capital invested, other
than to appeal to their USA corporate patriotism. I could also use that
patriotic appeal to urge them to increase their dividends to
shareholders which would pump tens of billions of dollars into our
consumer economy to encourage much-needed spending. Some of these
successful companies like Google, EMC and others offer no dividends at
all to their owners. Those exhortations are just exhortations. CEOs can
do what they want.

As
I write, mobs all over the world are rioting about an amateurish video
portraying Muhammad as a horny buffoon. Death toll so far: at least
thirty, including Christopher Stevens, US ambassador to Libya, and three
embassy staffers. Not to be outdone, Pakistan’s railways minister
announced he would pay $100,000 to anyone who murdered the videomaker,
and added, “I call upon these countries and say: Yes, freedom of
expression is there, but you should make laws regarding people insulting
our Prophet. And if you don’t, then the future will be extremely
dangerous.” More riots, embassy closings and a possible assassination
attempt or two followed the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo’s
retaliatory publication of cartoons of Muhammad naked. To bring it all
full circle, an Iranian foundation has raised to $3.3 million the reward
it’s offering for the murder of Salman Rushdie. (Just out and highly
recommended: Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s humane and heroic memoir of his years in hiding.)

Shocking as these events were, some reactions here at home were not helpful: Newsweek’s
notorious “Muslim Rage” cover, for example, with its photo of
crazed-looking zealots. All together now: there are 1.6 billion Muslims,
only a tiny minority of whom are involved in this nonsense. Would Newsweek present a story about opposition to gay marriage with a photo of the
Westboro Baptist “God Hates Fags” church and the headline “Christian
Rage”?

SNIP

What if the right to be a wanker—a jerk, an annoying obsessive—is indeed where freedom begins? On WNYC’s The Takeaway, John Hockenberry had a confusing exchange with BBC chief Jeremy Bowen:

Hockenberry:
I’m wondering if it’s possible for the United Nations to create an
initiative that would talk about some sort of global convention on
blasphemy, that would create a cooperative enterprise to control these
kinds of incidents, not to interfere into anybody’s free speech rights
but to basically recognize that there is a global interest in keeping
people from going off the rails over a perceived sense of slight by
enforcing a convention of human rights, only in this particular case it
would be anti-blasphemy?

Bowen: It would be a
great idea if they could make it work, but of course you know, you think
that the United Nations struggled for ages, and I don’t think it’s yet
succeeded in coming up with a definition of “terrorism.” So, in the end,
how do you define “blasphemy”?

So the only thing
preventing some sort of international convention against “blasphemy” is
that people can’t agree about what it is? Perhaps the UN could ask
Vladimir Putin, who was eager to send three members of Pussy Riot to
prison for appearing at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior to
perform an anti-Putin “punk prayer” to the Virgin Mary. Their crime:
“hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” The rise of the Russian
Orthodox church in the former Soviet Union, and its connections to a
corrupt authoritarian regime, shows that Islam has no monopoly on
religious freakouts or their exploitation for political purposes. But
you already knew that, having lived through mosque burnings in several
states, and of course the extraordinary ongoing wave of arsons,
bombings, assaults, stalkings and murders committed against abortion
clinics, their doctors and staffs, almost all by deeply devout Catholics
and evangelicals.

I’m a big fan of Dr. Maarten Boudry,
a Belgian philosopher who’s a research fellow in the Department of
Philosopy & Moral Sciences of Ghent University. Boudry has spent a
lot of time showing that religion and science are incompatible,
attacking the distinction between “metaphysical naturalism” and
“methodological naturalism” (a distinction much beloved by
accommodationists), and generally pwning “Sophisticated Theologians™.”

You can find my earlier discussions of Boudry’s work here, here and here, and, if you’re familiar with the unctuous theologian Alvin Plantinga, be sure to read Boudry’s new review of Plantinga’s book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Boudry’s review is free online, starting on p. 21 of the latest newsletter from The International History, Philosophy and Science Working Group. But today I’m presenting something else: a real Sokal-style hoax
that Boudry has perpetrated. He informed me yesterday that he had
submitted a fake, post-modernish and Sophisticated-Theological™ abstract
to two theology conferences:

By the way, I thought
you might find this funny. I wrote a spoof abstract full of theological
gibberish (Sokal-style) and submitted it to two theology conferences,
both of which accepted it right away. It got into the proceedings of the
Reformational Philosophy conference. See Robert A. Maundy (an anagram
of my name) on p. 22 of the program proceedings.

To
save you the trouble of downloading it, I reproduce below, with
Boudry’s permission, “Maundy’s” abstract. Note that he made up a
college, too, but the quotation from John Haught is real.

An extremely disturbing new study published in the American Journal of Public Health finds that suicides have replaced car accidents as
the leading cause of injury-related death in the U.S. This is partly
because deaths from automobile accidents are down — that’s the good
news.

But the truly catastrophic news is that the suicide rate has
increased dramatically: between 2000 and 2009, according to data from
the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, deaths by suicide went
up by 15%, and deaths from poisoning increased by a whopping 128%.
Moreover, researchers say that many of the poisoning deaths, which are
labeled as “accidental,” may actually be intentional. According to the
study’s author, Professor Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West
Virginia University, “Suicides are terribly undercounted; I think the
problem is much worse than official data would lead us to believe.” He
added “there may be 20 percent or more unrecognized suicides.”

Experts
note that much of the increase in poisoning deaths is due to
prescription drug overdoses, but none of the reports I found about the
study speculate about what psychological, social, or economic causes are
behind the spike in suicides. (I was unable to find an online copy of
the study itself). But there is strong evidence elsewhere that our
disastrous economy may be playing a significant role. Last year, a report by
the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that “[s]uicide
rates in the U.S. tend to rise during recessions and fall amid economic
booms.”

Two new polls show Iowa Republican and Tea Party favorite Steve King in a dead heat with his Democratic opponent

An
internal poll released today by Democrat Christie Vilsack shows her
essentially tied with GOP Rep. Steve King in Iowa’s new 4th District. A separate public poll,
conducted by PPP and also released today, found similar results, with
King leading Vilsack by just 3 points at 48 to 45, within the margin of
error. The congressional race gives Democrats a chance to take down one
of the country’s most prominent Tea Party leaders, a man who once remarked that
the president “favors the black person” and, in 2008, predicted that
al-Qaida would be “dancing in the streets” if Barack “Hussein” Obama won
the presidency.

The internal poll (see the full memo here),
conducted by Democratic pollsters Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research,
shows King at 46 percent and Vilsack at 44 percent. “This one will
likely go down to the wire. But two concurrent surveys show all the
momentum behind Christie Vilsack,” the pollsters write. A May GQRR
showed King up by 16 points.

Iowa State University political science professor Steffen Schmidt told the
Ames Tribune of King, “He should have much higher ratings … I don’t
read it as ‘Christie Vilsack is a little bit behind anybody else,’ but I
would read it as ‘Jeez, an incumbent should have an advantage in a
question like that.’”

“As voters learn more about these
candidates, it’s not surprising that congressman King is losing steam,”
said Vilsack Campaign Manager Jessica Vanden Berg. The GQRR poll also
shows that King’s approval rating is now underwater, with 44 percent
opposed to the job he has done in Congress and 41 percent in favor.

From Robert Reich: http://robertreich.org/post/32350861559By Robert ReichWednesday, September 26, 2012“My
heart aches for the people I’ve seen,” Mitt Romney said, on the second
day of his Ohio bus tour. He’s now telling stories of economic hardship
among the people he’s met.

Up until now, Romney’s stories on the
campaign trail have been about business successes – people who started
businesses in garages and grew their companies into global giants,
entrepreneurs who succeeded because of grit and determination,
millionaires who began poor. Horatio Alger updated.

Curiously
absent from these narratives have been the stories of ordinary Americans
caught in an economy over which they have no control. That is, most of
us.

At least until now.

“I was yesterday with a woman who
was emotional,” Romney recounts, “and she said, ‘Look, I’ve been out of
work since May.’ She was in her 50s. She said, ‘I don’t see any
prospects. Can you help me?’”

Could it be Romney is finally getting the message that many Americans need help through no fault of their own?

“There are so many people in our country that are hurting right now,” Romney says. “I want to help them.”

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson